Saturday, January 1, 2011

THE AMERICAN MAJORITY SPOKE LOUDLY AND CLEARLY BACK IN NOVEMBER, RIGHT?

Not so fastcontends Karen Dolan, a fellow at the George Soros-funded Institute for Policy Studies, or IPS, and director of the Cities for Progress and Cities for Peace projects -- both Marxist front groups -- based at the radical organization.

"Progressives won in the 2010 midterm elections," declared Dolan back on the 8th of November. "Our work is now finally beginning. The veil of a happy Democrat governing majority is finally lifted. We didn't have it then; we don't have it now. But what we do have now is a more solidly progressive bunch of Dems in Congress and a president presumably less encumbered by the false illusion that 'playing nice' will get him a date with the other team... Let's push Obama to finally do the right thing through as many Executive Orders as we can present him."

Which leads us to this eerily parallel and all-too-familiar sounding development...

From the Miami Herald, December 15, 2010:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Seeks More Power

CARACAS -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez asked Parliament Tuesday to grant him sweeping legislative powers, for the fourth time since he took office in 1999. The request comes just weeks before a new national assembly with a much greater opposition presence is due to be inaugurated.

The so-called "enabling law" is expected to pass -- perhaps as early as Thursday --since the current assembly is dominated by pro-government lawmakers, despite the complaints by the opposition and some constitutional lawyers that the move was illegal.

Chavez has asked for the power to enact laws by decree for one year.

Henrique Capriles, the opposition governor of Miranda state, called the proposed law "a mockery for all our people."

Leopoldo Lopez, the leader of the opposition Popular Will movement, told CNN en Espanol that the enabling law was intended "to deprive the [new] parliament of space and relevance."

Despite the fact that the current assembly's term expires Jan. 5, it has delegated legislative powers to the president for the next twelve months. Chavez would be able to issue decrees covering a wide range of matters, including topics as diverse as taxes, telecommunications, local government, education and national defense.

Normally, parliamentary sessions end in mid-December. But such is the government's determination to make full use of its current majority that it has decided the legislature will sit through the Christmas holidays.

And the enabling law is far from being the only controversial legislation scheduled for speedy approval during this period. A package of five bills dubbed the "popular power" laws will establish the socialist commune as the basic unit of government and create a so-called "socialist economy" in which barter is prominent and profit frowned upon.

Reforms to press and telecommunications laws threaten to censor the Internet, take the opposition channel Globovision off most people's TV screens and seriously curtail freedom of expression.

Another bill, which might now be handed over to the executive under the terms of the enabling law, would channel foreign funds for nongovernmental organizations to the state -- for it to distribute at its discretion.

Written into the Declaration of Independence is a simple imperative, "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Our nation was built on this concept, but the Obama administration is using its power to write regulation to circumvent the will of the people and advance its own agenda.

Three recent examples of this overreach are shocking and all Americans should demand an end to the practice and a reversal of what has already been done... Using regulation to specifically subjugate the will of the people to the agenda of any president is nothing less than tyranny.

The New York Times and Fox News, an unlikely combination, recently reported that the Obama Administration is taking advantage of a rule in the final version of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 ("Obamacare") that authorizes Medicare coverage of yearly physical Examinations. The new rule says Medicare will cover "voluntary advance care planning" to discuss end-of-life treatment as part of an annual visit. The mandate for end-of-life planning, commonly referred to as "death panels", was specifically legislated out of Obamacare because of the uproar by the majority of Americans.

Earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC") voted to regulate the Internet for the first time. This scheme, known as "Net Neutrality" that forbids Internet service providers from impeding access to legal web content, may seem minor but it raises larger free speech issues and the threat of more intrusive legislation. This move, along party lines by appointed commissioners of the FCC and publicly welcomed by Mr. Obama, is nothing more than a power grab in defiance of the will of the people.

Perhaps the most dangerous use of regulatory power hanging over the American people is the judicially extended powers of the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") to regulate specific greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, as pollutants under the forty-year old Clean Air Act. The act was originally written to regulate air pollutants, not something that is ever present in the air -- and certainly not something that is part of life itself. However, with support of the Obama Administration, the EPA is now ready to regulate carbon dioxide. The Clean Air Act, as it is now written, requires that any source that emits more than 250 tons of carbon dioxide per year be required to capture those emissions. That threshold is so low that not only would it impose higher costs on power plants and refineries, but also farms, rural schools and hospitals.

You'll remember, Obama and his progressive abettors in Congress madly sprinted to the end of 2010, quickly ramming new laws and overreaching regulations down the throats of Americans in response to the November "shellacking" they took that was supposed to send the loud and clear message that the American people would not tolerate this alien "fundamental transformation of America" that Obama and the progressives were hell-bent on foisting upon the citizenry.

So much for the trounced Democrats and their establishment Republican cohorts heeding that message.

With a collective flip of their elitist middle finger, these brazen usurpers sent their own loud and clear message back to the American people that they, quite frankly, didn't give a damn about the election results. In fact, the new order made their intentions crystal clear that their Bataan death march towards a progressive utopia was not going to be impeded by any mere election.

On the contrary, in Hugo Chavez-like fashion, the Marxist army of progressive lawmakers launched a coup de tat against the United States Constitution and the will of the American people with a flurry of last-second, Christmas holiday-shielded legislation. Sound familiar?

So, what have we learned from this boys and girls?

Tyranny is tyranny. Whether in a South American banana republic or in the greatest nation on the face of the earth, the diabolical forces of tyranny press forward with the same single-minded resolve, the same insatiable appetite for power and the same contempt for the people whom their respective elected leaders are supposed to represent.

If the Marxist regimes can't rule by legislation because of lost majorities, they will rule by executive fiat, circumventing the legislative branch. If Senate filibusters threaten unwanted, unpopular legislation, new rules will be written to take the oxygen out of the filibuster. Unelected officials in sundry federal agencies will become de facto legislators, "regulating" new laws into existence. In short, every congressional as well as executive trick in the book will be exercised in propagating the leftist's ambitions.

A new Congress will be sworn in on January 5th in America. A new parliament on the same day in Venezuela. Both with new majorities who loudly decry the overreaching power grabs of their unabashed Marxist-leaning leaders.

Both Venezuelans and Americans will have to wait and see what these new legislative majorities are able to accomplish in this new year against the tyrannical ambitions of their leaders and their willing legislative abettors.